Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish: [ˈne̝ls ˈpoɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18

November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational

contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory,
for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also
a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.

Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that
energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in
stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy
level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been
supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He
conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be
separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving
as a wave or a stream of particles. The notion of complementarity
dominated Bohr's thinking in both science and philosophy.

Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of

Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in
1920. Bohr mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans
Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy, and Werner Heisenberg. He
predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was
named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was
discovered. Later, the element bohrium was named after him.

During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. After Denmark
was occupied by the Germans, he had a famous meeting with
Heisenberg, who had become the head of the German nuclear weapon
project. In September 1943 word reached Bohr that he was about to be
arrested by the Germans, and he fled to Sweden. From there, he was
flown to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear
weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan
Project. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on
nuclear energy. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and
the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy
Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for
Theoretical Physics in 1957.

Early years

Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 7 October 1885, the

second of three children of Christian Bohr,[1][2] a professor of
physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and Ellen Bohr (née Adler),
who was the daughter of David B. Adler from the wealthy Danish Jewish
Adler banking family.[3] He had an elder sister, Jenny, and a younger
brother Harald.[1] Jenny became a teacher,[2] while Harald became a
mathematician and footballer who played for the Danish national team
at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. Niels was a passionate
footballer as well, and the two brothers played several matches for the
Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub (Academic Football Club), with
Niels as goalkeeper.[4]

Head and shoulders of young man in a suit and tie

Bohr as a young man

Bohr was educated at Gammelholm Latin School, starting when he was

seven.[5] In 1903, Bohr enrolled as an undergraduate at Copenhagen
University. His major was physics, which he studied under Professor
Christian Christiansen, the university's only professor of physics at that
time. He also studied astronomy and mathematics under Professor
Thorvald Thiele, and philosophy under Professor Harald Høffding, a
friend of his father.[6][7]

In 1905 a gold medal competition was sponsored by the Royal Danish

Academy of Sciences and Letters to investigate a method for measuring
the surface tension of liquids that had been proposed by Lord Rayleigh
in 1879. This involved measuring the frequency of oscillation of the
radius of a water jet. Bohr conducted a series of experiments using his
father's laboratory in the university; the university itself had no physics
laboratory. To complete his experiments, he had to make his own
glassware, creating test tubes with the required elliptical cross-sections.
He went beyond the original task, incorporating improvements into
both Rayleigh's theory and his method, by taking into account the
viscosity of the water, and by working with finite amplitudes instead of
just infinitesimal ones. His essay, which he submitted at the last minute,
won the prize. He later submitted an improved version of the paper to
the Royal Society in London for publication in the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society.[8][9][7][10]

Harald became the first of the two Bohr brothers to earn a master's
degree, which he earned for mathematics in April 1909. Niels took
another nine months to earn his on the electron theory of metals, a
topic assigned by his supervisor, Christiansen. Bohr subsequently
elaborated his master's thesis into his much-larger Doctor of
Philosophy (dr. phil.) thesis. He surveyed the literature on the subject,
settling on a model postulated by Paul Drude and elaborated by
Hendrik Lorentz, in which the electrons in a metal are considered to
behave like a gas. Bohr extended Lorentz's model, but was still unable
to account for phenomena like the Hall effect, and concluded that
electron theory could not fully explain the magnetic properties of
metals. The thesis was accepted in April 1911,[11] and Bohr conducted
his formal defence on 13 May. Harald had received his doctorate the
previous year.[12] Bohr's thesis was groundbreaking, but attracted little
interest outside Scandinavia because it was written in Danish, a
Copenhagen University requirement at the time. In 1921, the Dutch
physicist Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen would independently derive a
theorem in Bohr's thesis that is today known as the Bohr–Van Leeuwen
theorem.[13]

A young man in a suit and tie and a young woman in a light coloured
dress sit on a stoop, holding hands

Bohr and Margrethe Nørlund on their engagement in 1910.

In 1910, Bohr met Margrethe Nørlund, the sister of the mathematician

Niels Erik Nørlund.[14] Bohr resigned his membership in the Church of
Denmark on 16 April 1912, and he and Margrethe were married in a
civil ceremony at the town hall in Slagelse on 1 August. Years later, his
brother Harald similarly left the church before getting married.[15]
Bohr and Margrethe had six sons.[16] The oldest, Christian, died in a
boating accident in 1934,[17] and another, Harald, died from childhood
meningitis.[16] Aage Bohr became a successful physicist, and in 1975
was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, like his father. Hans [da]
became a physician; Erik [da], a chemical engineer; and Ernest, a
lawyer.[18] Like his uncle Harald, Ernest Bohr became an Olympic
athlete, playing field hockey for Denmark at the 1948 Summer Olympics
in London.[19]

Physics

Bohr model

Main article: Bohr model

In September 1911, Bohr, supported by a fellowship from the Carlsberg
Foundation, travelled to England, where most of the theoretical work
on the structure of atoms and molecules was being done.[20] He met J.
J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory and Trinity College,
Cambridge. He attended lectures on electromagnetism given by James
Jeans and Joseph Larmor, and did some research on cathode rays, but
failed to impress Thomson.[21][22] He had more success with younger
physicists like the Australian William Lawrence Bragg,[23] and New
Zealand's Ernest Rutherford, whose 1911 small central nucleus
Rutherford model of the atom had challenged Thomson's 1904 plum
pudding model.[24] Bohr received an invitation from Rutherford to
conduct post-doctoral work at Victoria University of Manchester,[25]
where Bohr met George de Hevesy and Charles Galton Darwin (whom
Bohr referred to as "the grandson of the real Darwin").[26]

Bohr returned to Denmark in July 1912 for his wedding, and travelled
around England and Scotland on his honeymoon. On his return, he
became a privatdocent at the University of Copenhagen, giving lectures
on thermodynamics. Martin Knudsen put Bohr's name forward for a
docent, which was approved in July 1913, and Bohr then began
teaching medical students.[27] His three papers, which later became
famous as "the trilogy",[25] were published in Philosophical Magazine
in July, September and November of that year.[28][29][30][31] He
adapted Rutherford's nuclear structure to Max Planck's quantum
theory and so created his Bohr model of the atom.[29]

Planetary models of atoms were not new, but Bohr's treatment was.
[32] Taking the 1912 paper by Darwin on the role of electrons in the
interaction of alpha particles with a nucleus as his starting point,[33]
[34] he advanced the theory of electrons travelling in orbits of
quantized “stationary states” around the atom's nucleus in order to
stabilize the atom, but it wasn’t until his 1921 paper that he showed
that the chemical properties of each element were largely determined
by the number of electrons in the outer orbits of its atoms.[35][36][37]
[38] He introduced the idea that an electron could drop from a higher-
energy orbit to a lower one, in the process emitting a quantum of
discrete energy. This became a basis for what is now known as the old
quantum theory.[39]

Diagram showing electrons with circular orbits around the nucleus

labelled n=1, 2 and 3. An electron drops from 3 to 2, producing
radiation delta E = hv

The Bohr model of the hydrogen atom. A negatively charged electron,

confined to an atomic orbital, orbits a small, positively charged nucleus;
a quantum jump between orbits is accompanied by an emitted or
absorbed amount of electromagnetic radiation.

The evolution of atomic models in the 20th century: Thomson,

Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg/Schrödinger

In 1885, Johann Balmer had come up with his Balmer series to describe
the visible spectral lines of a hydrogen atom:

{\displaystyle {\frac {1}{\lambda }}=R_{\mathrm {H} }\left({\frac {1}

{2^{2}}}-{\frac {1}{n^{2}}}\right)\quad {\text{for}}\ n=3,4,5,...}
{\displaystyle {\frac {1}{\lambda }}=R_{\mathrm {H} }\left({\frac {1}
{2^{2}}}-{\frac {1}{n^{2}}}\right)\quad {\text{for}}\ n=3,4,5,...}

where λ is the wavelength of the absorbed or emitted light and RH is

the Rydberg constant.[40] Balmer's formula was corroborated by the
discovery of additional spectral lines, but for thirty years, no one could
explain why it worked. In the first paper of his trilogy, Bohr was able to
derive it from his model:

{\displaystyle R_{Z}={2\pi ^{2}m_{e}Z^{2}e^{4} \over h^{3}}}R_{Z}={2\pi

^{2}m_{e}Z^{2}e^{4} \over h^{3}}

where me is the electron's mass, e is its charge, h is Planck's constant

and Z is the atom's atomic number (1 for hydrogen).[41]

The model's first hurdle was the Pickering series, lines which did not fit
Balmer's formula. When challenged on this by Alfred Fowler, Bohr
replied that they were caused by ionised helium, helium atoms with
only one electron. The Bohr model was found to work for such ions.[41]
Many older physicists, like Thomson, Rayleigh and Hendrik Lorentz, did
not like the trilogy, but the younger generation, including Rutherford,
David Hilbert, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Max Born and Arnold
Sommerfeld saw it as a breakthrough.[42][43] The trilogy's acceptance
was entirely due to its ability to explain phenomena which stymied
other models, and to predict results that were subsequently verified by
experiments.[44][45] Today, the Bohr model of the atom has been
superseded, but is still the best known model of the atom, as it often
appears in high school physics and chemistry texts.[46]

Bohr did not enjoy teaching medical students. He decided to return to

Manchester, where Rutherford had offered him a job as a reader in
place of Darwin, whose tenure had expired. Bohr accepted. He took a
leave of absence from the University of Copenhagen, which he started
by taking a holiday in Tyrol with his brother Harald and aunt Hanna
Adler. There, he visited the University of Göttingen and the Ludwig
Maximilian University of Munich, where he met Sommerfeld and
conducted seminars on the trilogy. The First World War broke out while
they were in Tyrol, greatly complicating the trip back to Denmark and
Bohr's subsequent voyage with Margrethe to England, where he arrived
in October 1914. They stayed until July 1916, by which time he had been
appointed to the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of
Copenhagen, a position created especially for him. His docentship was
abolished at the same time, so he still had to teach physics to medical
students. New professors were formally introduced to King Christian X,
who expressed his delight at meeting such a famous football player.
[47]

Institute of Physics

In April 1917 Bohr began a campaign to establish an Institute of

Theoretical Physics. He gained the support of the Danish government
and the Carlsberg Foundation, and sizeable contributions were also
made by industry and private donors, many of them Jewish. Legislation
establishing the institute was passed in November 1918. Now known as
the Niels Bohr Institute, it opened on 3 March 1921, with Bohr as its
director. His family moved into an apartment on the first floor.[48][49]
Bohr's institute served as a focal point for researchers into quantum
mechanics and related subjects in the 1920s and 1930s, when most of
the world's best known theoretical physicists spent some time in his
company. Early arrivals included Hans Kramers from the Netherlands,
Oskar Klein from Sweden, George de Hevesy from Hungary, Wojciech
Rubinowicz from Poland and Svein Rosseland from Norway. Bohr
became widely appreciated as their congenial host and eminent
colleague.[50][51] Klein and Rosseland produced the institute's first
publication even before it opened.[49]
A block-shaped beige building with a sloped, red tiled roof

The Niels Bohr Institute, part of the University of Copenhagen

The Bohr model worked well for hydrogen and ionized single electron
Helium which impressed Einstein,[52][53] but could not explain more
complex elements. By 1919, Bohr was moving away from the idea that
electrons orbited the nucleus and developed heuristics to describe
them. The rare-earth elements posed a particular classification problem
for chemists, because they were so chemically similar. An important
development came in 1924 with Wolfgang Pauli's discovery of the Pauli
exclusion principle, which put Bohr's models on a firm theoretical
footing. Bohr was then able to declare that the as-yet-undiscovered
element 72 was not a rare-earth element, but an element with chemical
properties similar to those of zirconium. (Elements had been predicted
and discovered since 1871 by chemical properties [54]) and Bohr was
immediately challenged by the French chemist Georges Urbain, who
claimed to have discovered a rare-earth element 72, which he called
"celtium". At the Institute in Copenhagen, Dirk Coster and George de
Hevesy took up the challenge of proving Bohr right and Urbain wrong.
Starting with a clear idea of the chemical properties of the unknown
element greatly simplified the search process. They went through
samples from Copenhagen's Museum of Mineralogy looking for a
zirconium-like element and soon found it. The element, which they
named hafnium (Hafnia being the Latin name for Copenhagen) turned
out to be more common than gold.[55][56]

In 1922 Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services in
the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation
emanating from them".[57] The award thus recognised both the Trilogy
and his early leading work in the emerging field of quantum mechanics.
For his Nobel lecture, Bohr gave his audience a comprehensive survey
of what was then known about the structure of the atom, including the
correspondence principle, which he had formulated. This states that
the behaviour of systems described by quantum theory reproduces
classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers.[58]

The discovery of Compton scattering by Arthur Holly Compton in 1923

convinced most physicists that light was composed of photons, and
that energy and momentum were conserved in collisions between
electrons and photons. In 1924, Bohr, Kramers and John C. Slater, an
American physicist working at the Institute in Copenhagen, proposed
the Bohr–Kramers–Slater theory (BKS). It was more a programme than
a full physical theory, as the ideas it developed were not worked out
quantitatively. BKS theory became the final attempt at understanding
the interaction of matter and electromagnetic radiation on the basis of
the old quantum theory, in which quantum phenomena were treated
by imposing quantum restrictions on a classical wave description of the
electromagnetic field.[59][60]

Modelling atomic behaviour under incident electromagnetic radiation

using "virtual oscillators" at the absorption and emission frequencies,
rather than the (different) apparent frequencies of the Bohr orbits, led
Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and Kramers to explore different
mathematical models. They led to the development of matrix
mechanics, the first form of modern quantum mechanics. The BKS
theory also generated discussion of, and renewed attention to,
difficulties in the foundations of the old quantum theory.[61] The most
provocative element of BKS – that momentum and energy would not
necessarily be conserved in each interaction, but only statistically – was
soon shown to be in conflict with experiments conducted by Walther
Bothe and Hans Geiger.[62] In light of these results, Bohr informed
Darwin that "there is nothing else to do than to give our revolutionary
efforts as honourable a funeral as possible".[63]

Quantum mechanics

The introduction of spin by George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit in

November 1925 was a milestone. The next month, Bohr travelled to
Leiden to attend celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Hendrick
Lorentz receiving his doctorate. When his train stopped in Hamburg, he
was met by Wolfgang Pauli and Otto Stern, who asked for his opinion of
the spin theory. Bohr pointed out that he had concerns about the
interaction between electrons and magnetic fields. When he arrived in
Leiden, Paul Ehrenfest and Albert Einstein informed Bohr that Einstein
had resolved this problem using relativity. Bohr then had Uhlenbeck
and Goudsmit incorporate this into their paper. Thus, when he met
Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan in Göttingen on the way back,
he had become, in his own words, "a prophet of the electron magnet
gospel".[64]

1927 Solvay Conference in Brussels, October 1927. Bohr is on the right

in the middle row, next to Max Born.

Heisenberg first came to Copenhagen in 1924, then returned to

Göttingen in June 1925, shortly thereafter developing the mathematical
foundations of quantum mechanics. When he showed his results to
Max Born in Göttingen, Born realised that they could best be expressed
using matrices. This work attracted the attention of the British physicist
Paul Dirac,[65] who came to Copenhagen for six months in September
1926. Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger also visited in 1926. His
attempt at explaining quantum physics in classical terms using wave
mechanics impressed Bohr, who believed it contributed "so much to
mathematical clarity and simplicity that it represents a gigantic advance
over all previous forms of quantum mechanics".[66]

When Kramers left the institute in 1926 to take up a chair as professor

of theoretical physics at the Utrecht University, Bohr arranged for
Heisenberg to return and take Kramers's place as a lektor at the
University of Copenhagen.[67] Heisenberg worked in Copenhagen as a
university lecturer and assistant to Bohr from 1926 to 1927.[68]

Bohr became convinced that light behaved like both waves and
particles and, in 1927, experiments confirmed the de Broglie hypothesis
that matter (like electrons) also behaved like waves.[69] He conceived
the philosophical principle of complementarity: that items could have
apparently mutually exclusive properties, such as being a wave or a
stream of particles, depending on the experimental framework.[70] He
felt that it was not fully understood by professional philosophers.[71]

In February 1927, Heisenberg developed the first version of the

uncertainty principle, presenting it using a thought experiment where
an electron was observed through a gamma-ray microscope. Bohr was
dissatisfied with Heisenberg's argument, since it required only that a
measurement disturb properties that already existed, rather than the
more radical idea that the electron's properties could not be discussed
at all apart from the context they were measured in. In a paper
presented at the Volta Conference at Como in September 1927, Bohr
emphasized that Heisenberg's uncertainty relations could be derived
from classical considerations about the resolving power of optical
instruments.[72] Understanding the true meaning of complementarity
would, Bohr believed, require "closer investigation".[73] Einstein
preferred the determinism of classical physics over the probabilistic
new quantum physics to which he himself had contributed.
Philosophical issues that arose from the novel aspects of quantum
mechanics became widely celebrated subjects of discussion. Einstein
and Bohr had good-natured arguments over such issues throughout
their lives.[74]

In 1914 Carl Jacobsen, the heir to Carlsberg breweries, bequeathed his

mansion to be used for life by the Dane who had made the most
prominent contribution to science, literature or the arts, as an honorary
residence (Danish: Æresbolig). Harald Høffding had been the first
occupant, and upon his death in July 1931, the Royal Danish Academy
of Sciences and Letters gave Bohr occupancy. He and his family moved
there in 1932.[75] He was elected president of the Academy on 17
March 1939.[76]

By 1929 the phenomenon of beta decay prompted Bohr to again

suggest that the law of conservation of energy be abandoned, but
Enrico Fermi's hypothetical neutrino and the subsequent 1932
discovery of the neutron provided another explanation. This prompted
Bohr to create a new theory of the compound nucleus in 1936, which
explained how neutrons could be captured by the nucleus. In this
model, the nucleus could be deformed like a drop of liquid. He worked
on this with a new collaborator, the Danish physicist Fritz Kalckar, who
died suddenly in 1938.[77][78]
The discovery of nuclear fission by Otto Hahn in December 1938 (and
its theoretical explanation by Lise Meitner) generated intense interest
among physicists. Bohr brought the news to the United States where he
opened the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics with
Fermi on 26 January 1939.[79] When Bohr told George Placzek that this
resolved all the mysteries of transuranic elements, Placzek told him
that one remained: the neutron capture energies of uranium did not
match those of its decay. Bohr thought about it for a few minutes and
then announced to Placzek, Léon Rosenfeld and John Wheeler that "I
have understood everything."[80] Based on his liquid drop model of the
nucleus, Bohr concluded that it was the uranium-235 isotope and not
the more abundant uranium-238 that was primarily responsible for
fission with thermal neutrons. In April 1940, John R. Dunning
demonstrated that Bohr was correct.[79] In the meantime, Bohr and
Wheeler developed a theoretical treatment which they published in a
September 1939 paper on "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission".[81]